Hometown: Little Rock, AK

Homebase: Los Angeles, CA

Describe your music to someone who's never heard it before.

Guitars that reach for expansiveness with big vocals. Reaching, longing sound, kinda aggressive.

How did Valley Queen first start, and how has the band evolved since?

VQ is an evolution from a band I started in college with Neil and another friend of ours. I had just loved to LA from Little Rock and band was the stabilizing force in my life.

How have California and Arkansas, respectively, influenced your music?

Environment has a huge impact on songwriting. I write how I do today because I've lived in Los Angeles for 8 years. I write a lot about living in Los Angeles and the effects a city has on a person and their approach to life. Arkansas is more influenced by the blues and country, and I stuck more to that sound there. I think now my music comments on that perspective I used to have as an Arkansan. I've felt pushed to explore new territory in LA.

What's your songwriting process like?

It's always in flux. I do try to keep open to songs coming in at any time, in transit, or in a new place. Movement and travel usually instigate writing for me once I'm home and still again. Or a band or sound I really like can conjure my own ideas. Sometimes songs come because I've been more diligent about returning to the guitar and practicing.

You wrote in the Huffington Post about Arkansas's “Right to Discriminate” act inspiring your single “Who Ever Said.” Did you draw upon political sources when writing songs for the Destroyer EP?

I think the songs end up speaking to current times somehow. I keep repeating it—the personal is political. What's happening in our personal experience is reflected in the current socio-political climate somehow.

What or who was influencing you, musical or otherwise, while recording the EP?

We did include a bonus track on the physical copy of the EP by the band Destroyer, whom the EP is named after. Dan Bejar has certainly been a later influence on our sounds, especially the album Rubies. He's a beautiful, romantic grump.

How was it recording with producer Lewis Pesacov?

Neil is also an engineer/producer and Lewis has been a mentor to him for a while. He's a big brother to the band. These songs on the EP we have been recording on and off for the past three years and he recorded all of them, so there was a lot of time to develop a relationship and rapport.

Any plans for future releases in the works yet? I'm impatient for more.

We are pretty impatient to get back in the studio. We have an albums worth of songs ready to record and want to experiment with new ways of achieving sound. We just now got this EP released so once we finish a few months of touring on it, we'll start getting studio time lined up somehow. It's certainly on all our minds.

What's the strangest experience you've ever had on tour?

Can think of a few. We played this rural town in Texas called Olney once.  It was a one-street town. We closed the set with the song, "Ride". At the end of our set, a man brought a horse into the venue and said, “You said you gotta let me ride.” So I got on the horse and rode around the venue.

One random fun fact about Valley Queen?

Neil, Shawn and Gerry saved a man from a van on fire in the median of the street last night in New Orleans, Louisiana. I was home asleep. That's true.

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